Nanonewton scale adhesion force measurements on biotinylated microbeads with a robotic micropipette

Size Matters: Rethinking Hertz Model Interpretation for Cell Mechanics Using AFM

Cell mechanics are a biophysical indicator of cell state, such as cancer metastasis, leukocyte activation, and cell cycle progression. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a widely used technique to measure cell mechanics, where the Young modulus of a cell is usually derived from the Hertz contact model. However, the Hertz model assumes that the cell is an elastic, isotropic, and homogeneous material and that the indentation is small compared to the cell size. These assumptions neglect the effects of the cytoskeleton, cell size and shape, and cell environment on cell deformation. In this study, we investigated the influence of cell size on the estimated Young's modulus using liposomes as cell models. Liposomes were prepared with different sizes and filled with phosphate buffered saline (PBS) or hyaluronic acid (HA) to mimic the cytoplasm. AFM was used to obtain the force indentation curves and fit them to the Hertz model. We found that the larger the liposome, the lower the estimated Young's modulus for both PBS-filled and HA-filled liposomes. This suggests that the Young modulus obtained from the Hertz model is not only a property of the cell material but also depends on the cell dimensions. Therefore, when comparing or interpreting cell mechanics using the Hertz model, it is essential to account for cell size.

A system of FRET dyes designed to assess the degree of nano-scale contact between surfaces for interfacial adhesion

HYPOTHESIS

Interfacial adhesion caused by intermolecular forces only occur between surfaces at nano-scale contact (NSC), i.e., 0.1-0.4 nm and can be evaluated using Forster resonance energy transfer spectroscopy (FRET). For this, a suitable pair of fluorescent dyes must be selected, which spectroscopic properties will determine the FRET system performance. Here, we present a brand-new FRET dye system specifically designed to measure NSC in the distance range relevant for van-der-Waals and hydrogen bonding, i.e., below 1 nm.

EXPERIMENTS

We propose the FRET pair: 7-Amino-4-methyl-cumarin (C120) and 5(6)-Carboxy-2',7'-dichlor-fluorescein (CDCF) with high quantum yield (QY, QYC120 = 0.91 and QYCDCF = 0.64) and a distance detection range of 0.6-2.2 nm (0.1 mM). Adhered-thin films with increasing NSC degrees are produced with ascending pressure from 1.5 to 150 bar. To validate the proposed FRET measurement, we are correlating the bonded films interfacial adhesion (separation energy) to the measured FRET intensity, indicating its degree of NSC.

FINDINGS

We find that the proposed dyes are producing the desired FRET signal in adhered-thin films, for an interaction range of 0.6-2.2 nm, with high sensitivity due to the dye's high quantum yields. The increasing adhesion in these films is only caused by its increase in NSC. We find that the adhesion strength, measured as the separation energy between the films, is correlated to the measured FRET signal. Hence, the introduced FRET system is accurately able to measure the degree of NSC between soft surfaces.

Single-cell adhesion strength and contact density drops in the M phase of cancer cells

The high throughput, cost effective and sensitive quantification of cell adhesion strength at the single-cell level is still a challenging task. The adhesion force between tissue cells and their environment is crucial in all multicellular organisms. Integrins transmit force between the intracellular cytoskeleton and the extracellular matrix. This force is not only a mechanical interaction but a way of signal transduction as well. For instance, adhesion-dependent cells switch to an apoptotic mode in the lack of adhesion forces. Adhesion of tumor cells is a potential therapeutic target, as it is actively modulated during tissue invasion and cell release to the bloodstream resulting in metastasis. We investigated the integrin-mediated adhesion between cancer cells and their RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) motif displaying biomimetic substratum using the HeLa cell line transfected by the Fucci fluorescent cell cycle reporter construct. We employed a computer-controlled micropipette and a high spatial resolution label-free resonant waveguide grating-based optical sensor calibrated to adhesion force and energy at the single-cell level. We found that the overall adhesion strength of single cancer cells is approximately constant in all phases except the mitotic (M) phase with a significantly lower adhesion. Single-cell evanescent field based biosensor measurements revealed that at the mitotic phase the cell material mass per unit area inside the cell-substratum contact zone is significantly less, too. Importantly, the weaker mitotic adhesion is not simply a direct consequence of the measured smaller contact area. Our results highlight these differences in the mitotic reticular adhesions and confirm that cell adhesion is a promising target of selective cancer drugs as the vast majority of normal, differentiated tissue cells do not enter the M phase and do not divide.